Multimonitor support problems delay Canonical's X window replacement.

Ubuntu 13.10 ("Saucy Salamander") is scheduled for a final release on Oct. 17, but the OS won't include what was perhaps the biggest and most controversial change planned for the desktop environment.

Canonical announced in March that it would replace the X window system with Mir, a new display server that will eventually work across phones, tablets, and desktops. It has proven controversial, with Intel rejecting Ubuntu patches because Canonical's development of Mir meant it stopped supporting Wayland as a replacement for X.

Mir will ship by default on Ubuntu Touch for phones (but not tablets) this month, allowing a crucial part of Ubuntu's mobile plans to go forward. However, it won't be the default system on the desktop, because XMir—an X11 compatibility layer for Mir—isn't yet able to properly support multi-monitor setups. This is a step back from Canonical's original plan to "Deliver Mir + XMir + Unity 7 on the [13.10] desktop for those cards that supported it, and fall back to X for those that don’t."

"While we are on track to successfully deliver Mir for Ubuntu on smartphones, we are unfortunately not going to be able to deliver Mir + XMir + Unity 7 as the default experience on the desktop," Canonical executive Oliver Ries wrote yesterday. "Mir has made tremendous progress and is currently available on the Ubuntu archive for use, but there are still some outstanding quality issues that we want to resolve before we feel comfortable turning it on by default. Many of these issues live in the XMir part of the stack, which provides the integration between the X server and the underlying Mir system compositor. More specifically, the multi-monitor support in XMir is working, but not to the extent we’d like to see it for all of our users. The core of Mir is working reliably, but with XMir being a key component for our 13.10 goals, we didn’t want to compromise overall Ubuntu quality by shipping it."

Users who want to install Mir and XMir anyway can get it from the Ubuntu archives as an optional configuration.

13.10 is the last release before 14.04, the next Long Term Support (LTS) edition of Ubuntu. Canonical generally doesn't implement giant changes in the LTS, instead focusing on making it stable for business use on desktops and servers. Canonical presumably still wants to make Mir the default in 14.04 to achieve its mobile/desktop convergence plans, since many users would likely stick with that version for two years until the next LTS edition arrives.

Ries confirmed that in an e-mail to Ars, saying, "As of today we are still working towards getting XMir in shape for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. However, as usual with an LTS release we are closely evaluating the quality status of the software as well as the ecosystem need for software that is being included in an LTS release. vUDS [Virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit] in November will be the next point in time where we will assess the situation."

In an FAQ on the Ubuntu wiki, Canonical answers the question "Does this announcement mean that the Mir project has failed?" by saying, "Not at all. Mir has made significant progress, and has been built with a full CI (continuous integration) test suite, resulting in a reliable core, and a testament of this is Mir powering the Ubuntu for phones images. The only change is that we needed a little more time to assure the high quality our Ubuntu Desktop users expect, so we decided to do the right thing and not switch Mir on by default."

Canonical is holding discussions with GPU manufacturers to ensure support for Mir. "[W]hile those conversations are under NDA, I can assure you they are progressing forward," Ries wrote. Some more detail is provided on the Mir roadmap page, which says, "Right now, Mir does not run on desktop hardware that requires closed source drivers. However, we are in contact with GPU vendors and are working closely together with them to support Mir and to distill a reusable and unified EGL-centric driver model that further eases display server development in general and keeps cross-platform use-cases in mind."

Promoted Comments

Why is MIR controversial? That makes no sense. Intel is the controversial one.

Quite simple.

Wayland is not a display server, it's only display server protocol, between the display server (compositor in Wayland terms) and the applications.This protocol is lightweight and allows people to implement their own Wayland compositors, as they see fit.

The Wayland folks have a reference compositor (Weston) but they don't expect normal people to use it. Instead, the folks of Gnome, KDE, etc, are in the process of re-writing their X window manager/compositors to become Wayland compositors.

Supporting a new protocol requires a lot of effort from lots of people who keep drivers, compositors, toolkits, etc.And pretty much everyone who has to put in effort, including Canonical, had agreed to move from X to Wayland.

Then Canonical comes around and creates something else, which doesn't use the Wayland protocol and would require duplication of effort by a lot of people, who had no input in Canonical's decision.They never discussed with the Wayland folks any shortcommings of the protocol. And they haven't been able to point any advantages to whatever protocol/API Mir uses.

I'm concerned about 14.04LTS now... Mir/XMir is going to be a huge change, and one that certainly will carry lots of bugs and problems, as would any other major change like this. That's why releasing it in 13.10 made sense. Releasing it in the LTS risks causing problems for the people who are targeted by LTS, business and desktop users who demand stability.

I'm glad at least to see that we're finally seeing some serious moves from both Mir and Wayland to replace X, because that certainly has overstayed its welcome.

Well, that buys Steam/SteamOS some time. But what happens when Ubuntu makes the switch to Mir?

Valve currently promotes Ubuntu as the Linux distro of choice for using Steam, and it's very likely that SteamOS is based upon Ubuntu. Obviously Ubuntu with Mir will have to provide some legacy compatibility for old X-programs, but does Valve want to rely upon that?

So apart from being less supported by drivers, less tested and rough around the corners - what other benefits does Mir offer for any user?

Looks to me like best case I won't notice any difference, worst case some stuff breaks..

Don't forget slower too.

Running a stack with a native Wayland/Mir compositor would offer a smoother and better behaved environment all arround, even if the applications are still relying on XWayland/Mir.Native Wayland/Mir applications would also see further improvements (smoother/faster, no tearing etc).

On the other hand, the decision to run a complete X stack, with the usual X compositor, on top of XMir is just baffling.

I'm really looking forward to seeing X replaced and being a distant and terrible memory. Its too bad Mir wasn't stable enough for this last non-LTS release. At least it will be available in the repo. I am looking forward to at least trying Mir + XMir before I make any judgments about the progress Canonical is making. Maybe my hardware will be well supported and I can go Mir full-time.

Also, looking forward to trying out Ubuntu Phone on this Galaxy Nexus I'm about to retire.

Why is MIR controversial? That makes no sense. Intel is the controversial one.

Quite simple.

Wayland is not a display server, it's only display server protocol, between the display server (compositor in Wayland terms) and the applications.This protocol is lightweight and allows people to implement their own Wayland compositors, as they see fit.

The Wayland folks have a reference compositor (Weston) but they don't expect normal people to use it. Instead, the folks of Gnome, KDE, etc, are in the process of re-writing their X window manager/compositors to become Wayland compositors.

Supporting a new protocol requires a lot of effort from lots of people who keep drivers, compositors, toolkits, etc.And pretty much everyone who has to put in effort, including Canonical, had agreed to move from X to Wayland.

Then Canonical comes around and creates something else, which doesn't use the Wayland protocol and would require duplication of effort by a lot of people, who had no input in Canonical's decision.They never discussed with the Wayland folks any shortcommings of the protocol. And they haven't been able to point any advantages to whatever protocol/API Mir uses.

Why is MIR controversial? That makes no sense. Intel is the controversial one.

Mir is controversial because Canonical's announcement incorrectly maligned the preexisting community effort (Wayland) that made Mir possible while letting people think Canonical did it all themselves. On top of that Mir has no technical benefits over Wayland and some unattractive licensing restrictions.

Why is MIR controversial? That makes no sense. Intel is the controversial one.

Quite simple.

Wayland is not a display server, it's only display server protocol, between the display server (compositor in Wayland terms) and the applications.This protocol is lightweight and allows people to implement their own Wayland compositors, as they see fit.

The Wayland folks have a reference compositor (Weston) but they don't expect normal people to use it. Instead, the folks of Gnome, KDE, etc, are in the process of re-writing their X window manager/compositors to become Wayland compositors.

Supporting a new protocol requires a lot of effort from lots of people who keep drivers, compositors, toolkits, etc.And pretty much everyone who has to put in effort, including Canonical, had agreed to move from X to Wayland.

Then Canonical comes around and creates something else, which doesn't use the Wayland protocol and would require duplication of effort by a lot of people, who had no input in Canonical's decision.They never discussed with the Wayland folks any shortcommings of the protocol. And they haven't been able to point any advantages to whatever protocol/API Mir uses.

Canonical is totally entitled to go forward with their own projects , goals and ambitions . Nobody is forcing Canonical to support Wayland and nobody is forced to work with Canonicals projects.

Why is MIR controversial? That makes no sense. Intel is the controversial one.

Quite simple.

Wayland is not a display server, it's only display server protocol, between the display server (compositor in Wayland terms) and the applications.This protocol is lightweight and allows people to implement their own Wayland compositors, as they see fit.

The Wayland folks have a reference compositor (Weston) but they don't expect normal people to use it. Instead, the folks of Gnome, KDE, etc, are in the process of re-writing their X window manager/compositors to become Wayland compositors.

Supporting a new protocol requires a lot of effort from lots of people who keep drivers, compositors, toolkits, etc.And pretty much everyone who has to put in effort, including Canonical, had agreed to move from X to Wayland.

Then Canonical comes around and creates something else, which doesn't use the Wayland protocol and would require duplication of effort by a lot of people, who had no input in Canonical's decision.They never discussed with the Wayland folks any shortcommings of the protocol. And they haven't been able to point any advantages to whatever protocol/API Mir uses.

Canonical is totally entitled to go forward with their own projects , goals and ambitions . Nobody is forcing Canonical to support Wayland and nobody is forced to work with Canonicals projects.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean people aren't allowed to castigate them for what they believe are bad decisions. In any case what you're advocating is that people should just take their ball and go home which is not constructive; especially in a sphere like open source software where cooperation and collaboration is so important and valuable.

Why is MIR controversial? That makes no sense. Intel is the controversial one.

Mir is controversial because Canonical's announcement incorrectly maligned the preexisting community effort (Wayland) that made Mir possible while letting people think Canonical did it all themselves. On top of that Mir has no technical benefits over Wayland and some unattractive licensing restrictions.

That announcement could have been controversial, but that does not makes the MIR project controversial in any way. Those developers quickly retracted from some of their claims and that is it. MIR have technical benefits for Canonical and its license makes sense for Canonical. What is the problem with that?

Canonical is totally entitled to go forward with their own projects , goals and ambitions . Nobody is forcing Canonical to support Wayland and nobody is forced to work with Canonicals projects.

And how exactly does that absolve Cannonical from all criticism about their plans? Also their decision splits up development resources since people now have to support one additional protocol so clearly there are consequences to the larger community at hand.

Also if I should now go looking through articles about stuff MS does, am I going to find you arguing the same thing there? "Oh it doesn't matter that MS published an official standard that it's not actually implementing, after all nobody is forced to work with MS office?"

Why is MIR controversial? That makes no sense. Intel is the controversial one.

Quite simple.

Wayland is not a display server, it's only display server protocol, between the display server (compositor in Wayland terms) and the applications.This protocol is lightweight and allows people to implement their own Wayland compositors, as they see fit.

The Wayland folks have a reference compositor (Weston) but they don't expect normal people to use it. Instead, the folks of Gnome, KDE, etc, are in the process of re-writing their X window manager/compositors to become Wayland compositors.

Supporting a new protocol requires a lot of effort from lots of people who keep drivers, compositors, toolkits, etc.And pretty much everyone who has to put in effort, including Canonical, had agreed to move from X to Wayland.

Then Canonical comes around and creates something else, which doesn't use the Wayland protocol and would require duplication of effort by a lot of people, who had no input in Canonical's decision.They never discussed with the Wayland folks any shortcommings of the protocol. And they haven't been able to point any advantages to whatever protocol/API Mir uses.

Canonical is totally entitled to go forward with their own projects , goals and ambitions . Nobody is forcing Canonical to support Wayland and nobody is forced to work with Canonicals projects.

And no one said they aren't. What people don't like is duplicating an existing effort and the disparaging of another project that they were nominally part of without having contributed those observations previously. And considering that probably around 99% of the code that goes into an Ubuntu release was written by other than Canonical employees, the whole 'they've got the right to go it alone' attitude comes across as pretty naive

In any case what you're advocating is that people should just take their ball and go home which is not constructive; especially in a sphere like open source software where cooperation and collaboration is so important and valuable.

Since when it has been a problem for the open source "community" to grab an open source code that you did not and build another project from there for your own tastes and interests ?

Not that this has anything to do with Mir, but that photo just keeps reminding me how ugly Ubuntu Unity is. what a space hog that sidebar is for laptops with low res displays.

The sidebar width is adjustable, it doesn't need to take up that much space. I agree that the default size is a bit obnoxiously large on a low res monitor (personally I'd go a bit smaller than default even on a high res monitor, but that's somewhat a matter of personal taste), but it's really not the biggest problem with Unity, or even close to the top. On a vertically constrained 16:9 monitor, having it on the side rather than the bottom is a benefit.

For me, the biggest problem is that it doesn't let you easily separate out different windows of the same application. Unity is actually quite nice for dealing with media players and web browsers, but when you have a bunch of very similar looking spreadsheets from the same template but with different data (or similar looking PDFs, etc), it fails miserably. All of the ways for switching through different windows of the same app are primarily visually-focused rather than focusing on the document title, and generally reposition/rearrange them continuously according to which most recently had focus, rather than keeping them consistently arranged for the whole duration of your session.

For certain things, I've switched to Google Docs just so I can open documents in browser tabs (which show the title and stay in the order I put them) rather than as separate windows in LibreOffice.

Why is MIR controversial? That makes no sense. Intel is the controversial one.

Quite simple.

Wayland is not a display server, it's only display server protocol, between the display server (compositor in Wayland terms) and the applications.This protocol is lightweight and allows people to implement their own Wayland compositors, as they see fit.

The Wayland folks have a reference compositor (Weston) but they don't expect normal people to use it. Instead, the folks of Gnome, KDE, etc, are in the process of re-writing their X window manager/compositors to become Wayland compositors.

Supporting a new protocol requires a lot of effort from lots of people who keep drivers, compositors, toolkits, etc.And pretty much everyone who has to put in effort, including Canonical, had agreed to move from X to Wayland.

Then Canonical comes around and creates something else, which doesn't use the Wayland protocol and would require duplication of effort by a lot of people, who had no input in Canonical's decision.They never discussed with the Wayland folks any shortcommings of the protocol. And they haven't been able to point any advantages to whatever protocol/API Mir uses.

Canonical is totally entitled to go forward with their own projects , goals and ambitions . Nobody is forcing Canonical to support Wayland and nobody is forced to work with Canonicals projects.

And no one said they aren't. What people don't like is duplicating an existing effort and the disparaging of another project that they were nominally part of without having contributed those observations previously. And considering that probably around 99% of the code that goes into an Ubuntu release was written by other than Canonical employees, the whole 'they've got the right to go it alone' attitude comes across as pretty naive

Well, if canonical decides that the direction where Wayland is heading is not precisely what they want for whatever reason, why they have to fully support and commit themselves to Wayland ?

Because having to support different, incompatible, protocols and interfaces ends up hurting everyone, including themselves.And they don't really have the manpower to do it all by themselves anyway. Mir won't survive and this is all just a big distraction.

It's like Canonical were to say "oh, we don't really like HTTP/2.0, so we'll roll out our own HTTP protocol and webserver and we'll patch Firefox and Chrome to support it instead of HTTP/2.0".

Not to mention, all that talk about the direction of Wayland, has never materialized into a list of concrete issues with the Wayland protocol.

Why is MIR controversial? That makes no sense. Intel is the controversial one.

Quite simple.

Wayland is not a display server, it's only display server protocol, between the display server (compositor in Wayland terms) and the applications.This protocol is lightweight and allows people to implement their own Wayland compositors, as they see fit.

The Wayland folks have a reference compositor (Weston) but they don't expect normal people to use it. Instead, the folks of Gnome, KDE, etc, are in the process of re-writing their X window manager/compositors to become Wayland compositors.

Supporting a new protocol requires a lot of effort from lots of people who keep drivers, compositors, toolkits, etc.And pretty much everyone who has to put in effort, including Canonical, had agreed to move from X to Wayland.

Then Canonical comes around and creates something else, which doesn't use the Wayland protocol and would require duplication of effort by a lot of people, who had no input in Canonical's decision.They never discussed with the Wayland folks any shortcommings of the protocol. And they haven't been able to point any advantages to whatever protocol/API Mir uses.

Canonical is totally entitled to go forward with their own projects , goals and ambitions . Nobody is forcing Canonical to support Wayland and nobody is forced to work with Canonicals projects.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean people aren't allowed to castigate them for what they believe are bad decisions. In any case what you're advocating is that people should just take their ball and go home which is not constructive; especially in a sphere like open source software where cooperation and collaboration is so important and valuable.

Oh bull! If you spend any time at all on forums or comment sections where open source is discussed then you will realize that the open source community is really vicious. Of course people can give them hell for not doing what they think they should do. That's par for the course. I use linux and open source software and I have for years. What I can tell you for sure that the community is not one big happy family. Let's stick to reality please.

Well, that buys Steam/SteamOS some time. But what happens when Ubuntu makes the switch to Mir?

Valve currently promotes Ubuntu as the Linux distro of choice for using Steam, and it's very likely that SteamOS is based upon Ubuntu. Obviously Ubuntu with Mir will have to provide some legacy compatibility for old X-programs, but does Valve want to rely upon that?

My bet for SteamOS is Valve do their own distribution. They choose what software ships, they control it, this will not be a typical Linux distribution. Think TiVo rather than Ubuntu.

Because having to support different, incompatible, protocols and interfaces ends up hurting everyone, including themselves.And they don't really have the manpower to do it all by themselves anyway. Mir won't survive and this is all just a big distraction.

It's like Canonical were to say "oh, we don't really like HTTP/2.0, so we'll roll out our own HTTP protocol and webserver and we'll patch Firefox and Chrome to support it instead of HTTP/2.0".

Not to mention, all that talk about the direction of Wayland, has never materialized into a list of concrete issues with the Wayland protocol.

And try to bully Firefox/Google into supporting their own custom version forever as well

I'm sure that the reasons are pretty obvious to Canonical: Developing and shipping MIR will get what they want to market faster across all of their devices than messing around with Wayland. Canonical is pushing their own multiplatform needs ahead of the group effort for the replacement of X - makes sense to me from a financial standpoint. They want to be ready for the phone-tablet-home desktop convergence.

As a guess, when major players (such as Canonical) agree on a direction (Wayland) and there is effort (time and money) put into place to get there, pulling your support (Canonical) in favor of your own proprietary system (Mir) is going to really annoy some people. History matters and leaving people hanging is not nice.

I'm sure that the reasons are pretty obvious to Canonical: Developing and shipping MIR will get what they want to market faster across all of their devices than messing around with Wayland. Canonical is pushing their own multiplatform needs ahead of the group effort for the replacement of X - makes sense to me from a financial standpoint. They want to be ready for the phone-tablet-home desktop convergence.

It makes sense, when you totally underestimate your development time and costs.

In practice, if you consider their multiplatform needs (native Mir, not X on Mir), their efforts are way behind Wayland based efforts.Jolla has demonstrated and plans to have smartphones for sale by the end of 2013. Using Wayland for display.Gnome 3.10 is out with (rough) Wayland support....

Canonical is totally entitled to go forward with their own projects , goals and ambitions . Nobody is forcing Canonical to support Wayland and nobody is forced to work with Canonicals projects.

And how exactly does that absolve Cannonical from all criticism about their plans? Also their decision splits up development resources since people now have to support one additional protocol so clearly there are consequences to the larger community at hand.

Also if I should now go looking through articles about stuff MS does, am I going to find you arguing the same thing there? "Oh it doesn't matter that MS published an official standard that it's not actually implementing, after all nobody is forced to work with MS office?"

That absolves them from that nonsensical criticism since the criticism is basically about canonical using and existing open source project to create another one. Last time i checked , that was not morally wrong nor unprecedented .

Their decision did not split any development resources since the Wayland, kde and gnome folks clearly stated that they are not going to support MIR, only Wayland. In fact, they accelerated their sluggish development and support of wayland after canonical's announcement of MIR, let alone the FUD campaign against MIR and Canonical.

And let me remind you that any involvement in the open source world from companies like Intel and Samsung is not for the " benefit of the greater community". If Intel and other corporations hire developers to work with open source projects , is because they want those projects to work for their own interest. Don't be naive.

And i do not care what MS does as long they try to implement an open standard.

This fragmentation on Linux is why the desktop versions haven't taken off, and won't. Even when developers seem to agree on a project if one decides later to fork off development what can you do? They (the developers) are sometimes their own worst enemy.

PS: waiting for all the down votes because I said something bad about Linux...

Mir is controversial because it is a genuine stable API, and not merely an efficient description/implementation of a window compositor. Mir was designed with the ability to attach a translation layer to talk to whatever underlying system its attached to, whether it be Android, X11, etc.

Mir is controversial because it is a genuine stable API, and not merely an efficient description/implementation of a window compositor. Mir was designed with the ability to attach a translation layer to talk to whatever underlying system its attached to, whether it be Android, X11, etc.